I'm resigned to the impossibility of figuring out how otherwise good and smart people have horrible politics. I can only observe, without having a worthwhile explanation, that they sometimes do.
It's much easier if the person in question is plainly an a**hole.
I think you make a good point about people being complex. So the first question that's worth asking about someone whose politics you question is Why are you supporting this horrible person for office. The answer can be surprising.
Take one obvious example that most of us are old enough to remember. There are people who supported Clinton both times that he won, simply because they liked the platform he ran on and despite his character flaws. There are others who opposed him, not because they necessarily disliked his platform, but because they believed that character matters in elected officials and found his objectionable. (Personally, I think him a pretty appalling excuse for a human being, even if I like many of the things he tried to do while in office.)
Things get more complex when you find people that have essentially identical views on the issues. Faced by a candidate whom they agree with on some issues and disagree with on others, they may vote differently based on how they prioritize the various issues.
Certainly there are extreme cases -- Trump, for example, has absolutely nothing that I can see to recommend him. Unless you somehow manage to see politics are merely a show, with zero real world consequences. But in general people, and circumstances, are rarely binary good/bad.
Is there anyone in the US who has a stronger work ethic than immigrants?
In pretty much any country, no group has a stronger work ethic than immigrants. About the only exceptions are places where most of the immigrants are retirees or the idle rich.
The US is unusual only in the numbers of immigrants that we have been blessed (and we have been blessed) with. Not unique, certainly, but unusual.
I have a long time friend, Kile Smith, who is actually a living breathing composer. He heard a recording of the Brahms Requiem when he was a teenager and decided, without much other background or context other than playing some bass and singing in his high school chorus, that that was what he wanted to do.
I met Kile when we both attended Bible College in the mid 70's. Long story for another time. Suffice it to say we became good friends, went our separate ways for a while, and then reconnected a few years ago courtesy of Facebook. For which I'm grateful, Kile is a good person to know.
Most serious arts have a sort of "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" aspect to them. They require a lot of time - hours and hours and hours - of hard work, often time spent alone, with no particular guarantee that you are going to get anywhere. Composing has the additional complication that, to actually realize your work, you have to get someone to perform it. Which introduces a kind of chicken-and-egg thing - if you don't really have a reputation yet, how do you persuade someone to invest in performing your stuff? But if nobody ever performs your stuff, how do you build a reputation?
It's a challenge.
Kile is my age - 69 and counting - and his work is now performed and recorded a lot, by ensembles with real national and international reputations. But it took decades of hard lonely work to make that happen. If you ask him, he will tell you that his secret is having an "iron butt" - he made himself sit in a chair for hours, day after day, to do the work. He's an extremely humble guy, makes no great claims about his talents, but he also knows his work is good.
And it is good.
Most of his work is sacred choral stuff. He's also done some orchestral work, and has set texts by folks as various as Seneca, Robert Lax, Tagore, and Stephen Foster.
Here is Kile talking about his process in composing an Agnus Del.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMoL-y_vjIY
One of the movements from his setting of texts by Seneca, "The Waking Sun".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0J1pgCAx3g
"The stars shine", from his "Consolation of Apollo", a setting of a text from Boethius.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZIe8d5StCw
"Three Spirituals for Piano Trio", an instrumental piece.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq6cjnOxW00
Kile almost died this year. He had been feeling ill for a while, with weird and non-specific symptoms. Doctors gave him a bewildering variety of diagnoses, none of which led to a useful treatment plan. He finally got an accurate diagnosis of multiple myolema and has spent the last couple of months in the oncology ward at University of Pennsylvania Hospital. He's doing better - still a long road ahead, but improving, with good prospects for managing things and having lots of years to go.
While in isolation, he finished a piece that had been commissioned. I suggested to him (via Facebook IM, it was a no-visitors situation and talking on the phone was too tiring) that he might want to take his condition as an opportunity to rest for a bit, but apparently he wasn't having it.
Let us work while we have the light.
Thank you for this opportunity to share my good friend with you all.
Is there anyone in the US who has a stronger work ethic than immigrants?
Maybe it's just me, but every time I see someone who looks "immigrant-ish" - which usually means cafe au lait skin tone and an accent - they are working their asses off.
You know those "how many X does it take to do Y" jokes? Here is mine.
How many immigrants does it take to... oh wait, never mind, they're done.
russell - Grok needs to read the Second Treatise on Government. Also the preamble to the Massachusetts Constitution, which preceded and was a model for the US Constitution.
I'm sure that Grok has been fed those things, but what it "thinks" about those things is just a matter of remixing what others have said about those texts.
The “rugged individualist” myth has been the source of more suffering in America than almost anything else.
And Grok cites Locke to support the claim that it's a "core American value".
You can persuade me that Locke argues for fundamental human rights, belonging to each individual.
I am... less than persuaded that Locke argued for "rugged individualism". If anything, Locke argued for a social contract, where we all agree to surrender some personal liberties in order to live in society, as opposed to in a state of nature.
Grok needs to read the Second Treatise on Government. Also the preamble to the Massachusetts Constitution, which preceded and was a model for the US Constitution.
Oh, I expect that they would be satisfied with establishing whether there had been miscegenation in the last generation or two. The old 1 drop approach having died of all the mixing in the century and a half since owners could, and did, rape their slaves with impunity.
One could try just going by melanin, except that would restrict testing to late winter and early spring. Otherwise summer tans start confusing the issue vs permanent sun tans.
I doubt that DNA testing would do what the racists want, since by the old "one drop rule", we're ALL africans, and the thing that gets them riled up is "melanin content", which is only weakly related to DNA.
Now, some of us have more Neanderthal DNA than others, but that miscegenation is long, long in the past. Probably.
And tends to be an enthusiasm of people whose "understanding" of the American frontier is limited to Hollywood movies and old TV westerns. When the reality was that, in the Old West people cooperated to survive. And those who didn't didn't.
As a plus the new categories would allow the reintroduction of miscegenation laws.
As a small bit of pedantry, what we had were anti-miscegenation laws.
At least this time around it would be possible (maybe not feasible as a general rule, but possible) to use DNA testing to determine if those laws had been violated. Although there might be an issue with the fact that some (whisper it!) expertise is required to run such tests and interpret the results.
Maybe a compromise could be found (call SCOTUS!) by creating 'metic' and 'helot' as new legal categories. His Orangeness already claims the right to revoke citizenship (iirc it's already in the works to get it to SCOTUS). If he could reduce non-Aryans to helots, the employers, who currently employ the swarthy 'illegals', would have their practices legalized and the base could be persuaded that legally abusable 'not really Americans' could be a boon instead of a nuisance. As a plus the new categories would allow the reintroduction of miscegenation laws: Race defilers would lose their full citizenship status which would be OK with SCOTUS since it would not technically make mixed marriages illegal but just discourage them and also further reduce the number of residents eligible to vote. For the privileged their non-Aryan wives could get the legal status of concubine (I think His Orangeness would appreciate that).
"American culture is diverse, shaped by history, immigration, and regional differences, but several core tenets recur across sources like sociological studies (e.g., Hofstede's cultural dimensions), historical analyses (e.g., Tocqueville's Democracy in America), and contemporary surveys (e.g., Pew Research on American values). These are not universal—exceptions and debates exist—but they form a widely recognized foundation." Core Tenets of American Culture
The US has consistently swung back and forth between more or less open door immigration policies, to highly restrictive ones. And we tend to swing back to restrictive policies when the number of immigrants in the US reaches about 15% of the overall population.
See here: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time
So, for example, in the later 19th C. we wanted folks to come because we wanted their labor. That's how my Italian great-grandparents come - great-grandpa was recruited to come dig holes for the NYC subway system.
Beginning at the turn of the 20th Century, folks began freaking out about it all, and by the 20's that resulted in the Immigration Act of 1924, which basically said no more immigrants from Asia at all, and far fewer from Eastern and Southern Europe. No more slant-eyes or swarthy garlic-eating weirdos. Right? Sound familiar?
So now we're back at around 15% and everybody is freaking out, like we always do. And Trump et al are riding that train.
Next, a question.
What "American culture" do we expect people to "assimilate" into? There are probably a couple dozen "American cultures" in play. I won't try to enumerate them, because we don't have all day here, but suffice it to say that there are *very many* places in this country where people speak different languages, practice different religions or no religion at all, listen to different kinds of music, eat different food, have different family structures.
It would appear from Vance's speech that what he would like is for everyone to speak primarily or exclusively English, be Christian (and preferably Catholic or evangelical Christian), and belong to a two-parent nuclear family with a male and female parent. I guess this is based on the idea that "English language", "Christian", and the "Leave it to Beaver" nuclear family are somehow "more American".
About 1 in 5 people in this country speak a language other than English at home. Are they "unassimilated"?
About 62% of people here identify as "Christian", but only about 3 in 10 people here attend church once a week or most weeks. About 28% of us identify as "religiously unaffiliated". The remaining 10% or so encompass all of the other faiths.
Are just that 3 in 10 "assimilated"?
Almost a quarter of American children live in single-parent households. Which is very high when compared to the rest of the world, but is not function of our rate of immigration. Are all of those families "assimilated"?
What is this "American culture" Vance et al are on about? What does it mean to be "assimilated" into that culture, whatever it is? Which of the variety of cultures that exist here get to be officially sanctions "American" ones?
I took up teaching maths part-time for the local university some time after I retired from full-time work. Sometimes I feel exploited, because the overseas students pay the universities very well, and the university pays me not much. But it is a joy to work with young people who take pleasure in learning.
novakant,
I don't know if this will cheer you up or not but I've got almost 40 years of teaching experience, and post COVID, I downgraded my expectations to be happy if I could get the class to learn one thing during a class session. I'm getting to the point where I'm happy if I can get a few students to learn one thing in class.
No believing Christian fundamentalist accepts that Mormons are real Christians. Farther outside the pale than even Catholics.
Consider that Italians and Irish were considered black around 140 years ago. 60 years ago, people doubted that a president could be Catholic while at the same time not accepting that Martin Luther King represented actual Christian beliefs. Never underestimate the ability of Americans to do backflips on points of cognitive dissonance.
I have to admit I was very curious to know what Usha thinks of this when I saw the video, particularly because when he first rose to prominence as possible VP pick all the stuff about her seemed to show that she was a) bright and b) fairly liberal. It's a mystery.
But yes, his response to that amazingly brave student shows how sneaky and tricksy he is in evading questions, and turning them round to say exactly whatever populist claptrap will play best with his audience, and how well that plays with such audiences. Horrifying is exactly the right word. And, as nous upthread remarks, very reminiscent of Charlie Kirk.
novakant - At least I feel on most days that I’m doing something useful, though I don’t really know what I’m doing yet.
I know a lot of teachers (myself included) with a decade or more of teaching experience that still feel like this - at least part of the time. We feel it less often, but it never quite goes away. We just get better at letting go of our expectations and more adept at flowing around the obstacles.
wj - a surprising number of evangelical fundamentalists have embraced their catholic co-religionists in the name of Christian Nationalism and being pro-forced-birth. They are also very positive where the various Orthodox denominations are concerned. They can all get along so long as there are no gays, women belong to their men, and none of the Catholics support these last couple Marxist Anti-Popes.
And they will be polite and keep their mouths shut on the whole Mormon thing for the sake of politics so long as no one presses them to affirm that Mormons are Christians.
But the JWs are still on the outs.
Gotta make concessions if you want to have your Christian Red Caesar.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “People and poliltics”
I'm resigned to the impossibility of figuring out how otherwise good and smart people have horrible politics. I can only observe, without having a worthwhile explanation, that they sometimes do.
It's much easier if the person in question is plainly an a**hole.
"
I think you make a good point about people being complex. So the first question that's worth asking about someone whose politics you question is Why are you supporting this horrible person for office. The answer can be surprising.
Take one obvious example that most of us are old enough to remember. There are people who supported Clinton both times that he won, simply because they liked the platform he ran on and despite his character flaws. There are others who opposed him, not because they necessarily disliked his platform, but because they believed that character matters in elected officials and found his objectionable. (Personally, I think him a pretty appalling excuse for a human being, even if I like many of the things he tried to do while in office.)
Things get more complex when you find people that have essentially identical views on the issues. Faced by a candidate whom they agree with on some issues and disagree with on others, they may vote differently based on how they prioritize the various issues.
Certainly there are extreme cases -- Trump, for example, has absolutely nothing that I can see to recommend him. Unless you somehow manage to see politics are merely a show, with zero real world consequences. But in general people, and circumstances, are rarely binary good/bad.
On “Another variety in the diversity of greasy”
But cleaned up kinda misses the point, doesn't it?
"
All cleaned up...
On “Horrifying stuff”
Is there anyone in the US who has a stronger work ethic than immigrants?
In pretty much any country, no group has a stronger work ethic than immigrants. About the only exceptions are places where most of the immigrants are retirees or the idle rich.
The US is unusual only in the numbers of immigrants that we have been blessed (and we have been blessed) with. Not unique, certainly, but unusual.
On “Weekend Music Thread #04 John Mackey”
I have a long time friend, Kile Smith, who is actually a living breathing composer. He heard a recording of the Brahms Requiem when he was a teenager and decided, without much other background or context other than playing some bass and singing in his high school chorus, that that was what he wanted to do.
I met Kile when we both attended Bible College in the mid 70's. Long story for another time. Suffice it to say we became good friends, went our separate ways for a while, and then reconnected a few years ago courtesy of Facebook. For which I'm grateful, Kile is a good person to know.
Most serious arts have a sort of "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" aspect to them. They require a lot of time - hours and hours and hours - of hard work, often time spent alone, with no particular guarantee that you are going to get anywhere. Composing has the additional complication that, to actually realize your work, you have to get someone to perform it. Which introduces a kind of chicken-and-egg thing - if you don't really have a reputation yet, how do you persuade someone to invest in performing your stuff? But if nobody ever performs your stuff, how do you build a reputation?
It's a challenge.
Kile is my age - 69 and counting - and his work is now performed and recorded a lot, by ensembles with real national and international reputations. But it took decades of hard lonely work to make that happen. If you ask him, he will tell you that his secret is having an "iron butt" - he made himself sit in a chair for hours, day after day, to do the work. He's an extremely humble guy, makes no great claims about his talents, but he also knows his work is good.
And it is good.
Most of his work is sacred choral stuff. He's also done some orchestral work, and has set texts by folks as various as Seneca, Robert Lax, Tagore, and Stephen Foster.
Here is Kile talking about his process in composing an Agnus Del.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMoL-y_vjIY
One of the movements from his setting of texts by Seneca, "The Waking Sun".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0J1pgCAx3g
"The stars shine", from his "Consolation of Apollo", a setting of a text from Boethius.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZIe8d5StCw
"Three Spirituals for Piano Trio", an instrumental piece.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq6cjnOxW00
Kile almost died this year. He had been feeling ill for a while, with weird and non-specific symptoms. Doctors gave him a bewildering variety of diagnoses, none of which led to a useful treatment plan. He finally got an accurate diagnosis of multiple myolema and has spent the last couple of months in the oncology ward at University of Pennsylvania Hospital. He's doing better - still a long road ahead, but improving, with good prospects for managing things and having lots of years to go.
While in isolation, he finished a piece that had been commissioned. I suggested to him (via Facebook IM, it was a no-visitors situation and talking on the phone was too tiring) that he might want to take his condition as an opportunity to rest for a bit, but apparently he wasn't having it.
Let us work while we have the light.
Thank you for this opportunity to share my good friend with you all.
On “I got depressed so I bought hydrangeas”
Thank you, nous, lj and pb.
On “Horrifying stuff”
Also, as a comment on the "work ethic" thing:
Is there anyone in the US who has a stronger work ethic than immigrants?
Maybe it's just me, but every time I see someone who looks "immigrant-ish" - which usually means cafe au lait skin tone and an accent - they are working their asses off.
You know those "how many X does it take to do Y" jokes? Here is mine.
How many immigrants does it take to... oh wait, never mind, they're done.
Just saying.
"
Now, some of us have more Neanderthal DNA than others, but that miscegenation is long, long in the past.
There are far fewer men who self-identify as Neanderthal than there are women who claim that they're married to one.
"
russell - Grok needs to read the Second Treatise on Government. Also the preamble to the Massachusetts Constitution, which preceded and was a model for the US Constitution.
I'm sure that Grok has been fed those things, but what it "thinks" about those things is just a matter of remixing what others have said about those texts.
"
Core Tenets of American Culture
The “rugged individualist” myth has been the source of more suffering in America than almost anything else.
And Grok cites Locke to support the claim that it's a "core American value".
You can persuade me that Locke argues for fundamental human rights, belonging to each individual.
I am... less than persuaded that Locke argued for "rugged individualism". If anything, Locke argued for a social contract, where we all agree to surrender some personal liberties in order to live in society, as opposed to in a state of nature.
Grok needs to read the Second Treatise on Government. Also the preamble to the Massachusetts Constitution, which preceded and was a model for the US Constitution.
"
Oh, I expect that they would be satisfied with establishing whether there had been miscegenation in the last generation or two. The old 1 drop approach having died of all the mixing in the century and a half since owners could, and did, rape their slaves with impunity.
One could try just going by melanin, except that would restrict testing to late winter and early spring. Otherwise summer tans start confusing the issue vs permanent sun tans.
"
I doubt that DNA testing would do what the racists want, since by the old "one drop rule", we're ALL africans, and the thing that gets them riled up is "melanin content", which is only weakly related to DNA.
Now, some of us have more Neanderthal DNA than others, but that miscegenation is long, long in the past. Probably.
"
And tends to be an enthusiasm of people whose "understanding" of the American frontier is limited to Hollywood movies and old TV westerns. When the reality was that, in the Old West people cooperated to survive. And those who didn't didn't.
"
Core Tenets of American Culture
The "rugged individualist" myth has been the source of more suffering in America than almost anything else.
"
As a plus the new categories would allow the reintroduction of miscegenation laws.
As a small bit of pedantry, what we had were anti-miscegenation laws.
At least this time around it would be possible (maybe not feasible as a general rule, but possible) to use DNA testing to determine if those laws had been violated. Although there might be an issue with the fact that some (whisper it!) expertise is required to run such tests and interpret the results.
"
Maybe a compromise could be found (call SCOTUS!) by creating 'metic' and 'helot' as new legal categories. His Orangeness already claims the right to revoke citizenship (iirc it's already in the works to get it to SCOTUS). If he could reduce non-Aryans to helots, the employers, who currently employ the swarthy 'illegals', would have their practices legalized and the base could be persuaded that legally abusable 'not really Americans' could be a boon instead of a nuisance. As a plus the new categories would allow the reintroduction of miscegenation laws: Race defilers would lose their full citizenship status which would be OK with SCOTUS since it would not technically make mixed marriages illegal but just discourage them and also further reduce the number of residents eligible to vote. For the privileged their non-Aryan wives could get the legal status of concubine (I think His Orangeness would appreciate that).
"
What is “American culture”?
Here are some of the basics.
"American culture is diverse, shaped by history, immigration, and regional differences, but several core tenets recur across sources like sociological studies (e.g., Hofstede's cultural dimensions), historical analyses (e.g., Tocqueville's Democracy in America), and contemporary surveys (e.g., Pew Research on American values). These are not universal—exceptions and debates exist—but they form a widely recognized foundation."
Core Tenets of American Culture
"
So, first, an observation.
The US has consistently swung back and forth between more or less open door immigration policies, to highly restrictive ones. And we tend to swing back to restrictive policies when the number of immigrants in the US reaches about 15% of the overall population.
See here: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time
So, for example, in the later 19th C. we wanted folks to come because we wanted their labor. That's how my Italian great-grandparents come - great-grandpa was recruited to come dig holes for the NYC subway system.
Beginning at the turn of the 20th Century, folks began freaking out about it all, and by the 20's that resulted in the Immigration Act of 1924, which basically said no more immigrants from Asia at all, and far fewer from Eastern and Southern Europe. No more slant-eyes or swarthy garlic-eating weirdos. Right? Sound familiar?
So now we're back at around 15% and everybody is freaking out, like we always do. And Trump et al are riding that train.
Next, a question.
What "American culture" do we expect people to "assimilate" into? There are probably a couple dozen "American cultures" in play. I won't try to enumerate them, because we don't have all day here, but suffice it to say that there are *very many* places in this country where people speak different languages, practice different religions or no religion at all, listen to different kinds of music, eat different food, have different family structures.
It would appear from Vance's speech that what he would like is for everyone to speak primarily or exclusively English, be Christian (and preferably Catholic or evangelical Christian), and belong to a two-parent nuclear family with a male and female parent. I guess this is based on the idea that "English language", "Christian", and the "Leave it to Beaver" nuclear family are somehow "more American".
About 1 in 5 people in this country speak a language other than English at home. Are they "unassimilated"?
About 62% of people here identify as "Christian", but only about 3 in 10 people here attend church once a week or most weeks. About 28% of us identify as "religiously unaffiliated". The remaining 10% or so encompass all of the other faiths.
Are just that 3 in 10 "assimilated"?
Almost a quarter of American children live in single-parent households. Which is very high when compared to the rest of the world, but is not function of our rate of immigration. Are all of those families "assimilated"?
What is this "American culture" Vance et al are on about? What does it mean to be "assimilated" into that culture, whatever it is? Which of the variety of cultures that exist here get to be officially sanctions "American" ones?
What is "American culture"? Who gets to decide?
On “I got depressed so I bought hydrangeas”
I took up teaching maths part-time for the local university some time after I retired from full-time work. Sometimes I feel exploited, because the overseas students pay the universities very well, and the university pays me not much. But it is a joy to work with young people who take pleasure in learning.
"
novakant,
I don't know if this will cheer you up or not but I've got almost 40 years of teaching experience, and post COVID, I downgraded my expectations to be happy if I could get the class to learn one thing during a class session. I'm getting to the point where I'm happy if I can get a few students to learn one thing in class.
On “Horrifying stuff”
No believing Christian fundamentalist accepts that Mormons are real Christians. Farther outside the pale than even Catholics.
Consider that Italians and Irish were considered black around 140 years ago. 60 years ago, people doubted that a president could be Catholic while at the same time not accepting that Martin Luther King represented actual Christian beliefs. Never underestimate the ability of Americans to do backflips on points of cognitive dissonance.
"
I have to admit I was very curious to know what Usha thinks of this when I saw the video, particularly because when he first rose to prominence as possible VP pick all the stuff about her seemed to show that she was a) bright and b) fairly liberal. It's a mystery.
But yes, his response to that amazingly brave student shows how sneaky and tricksy he is in evading questions, and turning them round to say exactly whatever populist claptrap will play best with his audience, and how well that plays with such audiences. Horrifying is exactly the right word. And, as nous upthread remarks, very reminiscent of Charlie Kirk.
On “I got depressed so I bought hydrangeas”
novakant - At least I feel on most days that I’m doing something useful, though I don’t really know what I’m doing yet.
I know a lot of teachers (myself included) with a decade or more of teaching experience that still feel like this - at least part of the time. We feel it less often, but it never quite goes away. We just get better at letting go of our expectations and more adept at flowing around the obstacles.
Every new class is a learning experience.
On “Horrifying stuff”
wj - a surprising number of evangelical fundamentalists have embraced their catholic co-religionists in the name of Christian Nationalism and being pro-forced-birth. They are also very positive where the various Orthodox denominations are concerned. They can all get along so long as there are no gays, women belong to their men, and none of the Catholics support these last couple Marxist Anti-Popes.
And they will be polite and keep their mouths shut on the whole Mormon thing for the sake of politics so long as no one presses them to affirm that Mormons are Christians.
But the JWs are still on the outs.
Gotta make concessions if you want to have your Christian Red Caesar.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.